Speaker 1: What do counterfeit bills have to do with brains? And
Speaker 1: why is it so hard for you to recognize a
Speaker 1: real penny? And what does this have to do with
Speaker 1: the building on the fifty euro bill recently getting replaced
Speaker 1: with the face of the goddess Europa And what did
Speaker 1: I have to do with that? And why did I
Speaker 1: campaign to the European Central Bank that all bills should
Speaker 1: be blank with a single hologram in the middle. Welcome
Speaker 1: to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.
Speaker 2: I'm a neuroscientist, and you might wonder how a neuroscientist
Speaker 2: got involved in studying counterfeit money. Ll hang tight, because
Speaker 2: in this episode we're going to see how all these
Speaker 2: issues intersect. The most pervasive mistakes that we make is
Speaker 2: believing that our visual systems give us a faithful representation of.
Speaker 1: What's out there. We think of our vision the way
Speaker 1: we think of a movie camera, like it's just capturing
Speaker 1: the information from the world. But there are a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of simple demonstrations that can quickly disabuse you of
Speaker 1: this notion. For example, imagine that I show you two pictures.
Speaker 1: I flash one, then it goes off, then the second
Speaker 1: one comes on, then it goes off, then the first
Speaker 1: one comes back on, and so on, So it alternates
Speaker 1: between pictures A and B, and it looks like it's
Speaker 1: the same picture. But let's say I let you know
Speaker 1: that there is a difference between the pictures, and your
Speaker 1: job is simply to spot the difference. Well, if you've
Speaker 1: ever played these sorts of games before, you know how
Speaker 1: surprisingly difficult it can be to tell the difference between them.
Speaker 1: It turns out that we are really blind to changes
Speaker 1: in scene, and these can be quite large changes. So
Speaker 1: you might have a big statue that's present in the
Speaker 1: background of one photo and not the other, or a
Speaker 1: jeep or an airplane, and the difference goes unseen. You
Speaker 1: can see some demos of this at eagleman dot com
Speaker 1: slash podcast. So what happens is that your attention slowly
Speaker 1: crawls over the photograph and you analyze the interesting landmarks
Speaker 1: until you finally detect what is changing. And once your
Speaker 1: brain has latched on to the appropriate object, then the
Speaker 1: change is trivial to see. But this happens only after
Speaker 1: a pretty exhaustive inspection. This is what's known as change blindness,
Speaker 1: and it highlights the importance of attention, which is to say,
Speaker 1: to see an object change, you have to attend to it.
Speaker 1: And what an experiment like this surface is is that
Speaker 1: you're not actually seeing the world with the rich detail
Speaker 1: that you implicitly believed you were. In fact, you're not
Speaker 1: aware of most of what's hitting your eyes. So imagine
Speaker 1: you're watching a short film with a single actor in it.
Speaker 1: He's cooking an omelet, and the camera cuts to a
Speaker 1: different angle as the actor continues his cooking. Surely you
Speaker 1: would notice if the actor changed into a different person, right,
Speaker 1: But in studies, two thirds of observers don't. In one
Speaker 1: really astonishing demonstration of change blindness, random pedestrians in a
Speaker 1: courtyard were stopped by an experimenter and they were asked
Speaker 1: for directions, So they start giving directions, and at some point,
Speaker 1: as the unsuspecting person is in the middle of explaining
Speaker 1: this workmen carrying a door walk right in between the
Speaker 1: two people, and unbeknownst to the pedestrian, the experimenter is
Speaker 1: stealthily replaced by a confederate who's been hiding behind the door.
Speaker 1: So the people are swapped, and after the door passes,
Speaker 1: a new person is standing there and the majority of
Speaker 1: subjects continue giving directions without noticing that the person they
Speaker 1: were talking to is not the same one that they
Speaker 1: were talking to. In other words, they were only encoding
Speaker 1: small amounts of the information that was hitting their eyes.
Speaker 1: The rest was assumption. Now, neuroscientists weren't the first to
Speaker 1: discover that placing your eyes on something is no guarantee
Speaker 1: of seeing it. Magicians figured this out long ago, and
Speaker 1: they perfected ways of leveraging this knowledge. So by directing
Speaker 1: your attention, magicians perform sleight of hand in full view.
Speaker 1: Their actions, their hand motions should give away the game,
Speaker 1: but they can rest assured that your brain process it
Speaker 1: is only small bits of the visual scene. It's not
Speaker 1: everything that's hitting your retinas. And by the way, this
Speaker 1: limitation of our vision helps to explain the colossal number
Speaker 1: of traffic accidents in which drivers will hit pedestrians who
Speaker 1: are in plane view, or they'll collide with cars that
Speaker 1: are right in front of them. Sometimes you'll even see
Speaker 1: stories where a car intersects with a train on the track.
Speaker 1: In some of these cases, the eyes are in the
Speaker 1: right place, but the brain isn't registering the stimulus. Vision
Speaker 1: is more than looking Now This is all an example
Speaker 1: of a larger point, which is that we're not generally
Speaker 1: aware of what's going on until we ask the question. So,
Speaker 1: for example, what is the position of your tongue in
Speaker 1: your mouth right now? Once you're asked the question, you
Speaker 1: can answer it, But presumably you weren't aware of the
Speaker 1: answer until I asked the question. Why does the brain
Speaker 1: work this way because your brain generally doesn't need to
Speaker 1: know most things. It simply needs to know how to
Speaker 1: go out and retrieve the data when it needs it.
Speaker 1: It perceives things on a need to know basis. You
Speaker 1: don't continuously track the position of your tongue in your
Speaker 1: consciousness because that knowledge is only useful in rare circumstances.
Speaker 1: So again, you're not aware of much of anything until
Speaker 1: you ask yourself about it. What does your left shoe
Speaker 1: feel like on your foot right now? What pitch is
Speaker 1: the hum of the air conditioner in the background. Just
Speaker 1: like with change blindness, we are unaware of most of
Speaker 1: what should be obvious to our senses. It's only after
Speaker 1: we deploy our attention onto small bits of the scene
Speaker 1: that we become aware of what we were missing. And
Speaker 1: before we engage our attention. We're typically not aware that
Speaker 1: we're not aware of those details. So not only is
Speaker 1: our perception of the world a construction that doesn't accurately
Speaker 1: represent the outside, it's weirder than that because we have
Speaker 1: the false impression of a full, rich picture, when in
Speaker 1: fact we only see what we need to know and
Speaker 1: what we ask questions about, and we don't see anything
Speaker 1: more than that. Now, this is a topic I'm going
Speaker 1: to return to in many episodes, but for now I
Speaker 1: want to ask what this has to do with the
Speaker 1: economic currencies on this planet. So the scene is Lima, Peru,
Speaker 1: a little before dawn. There's a bunch of houses and buildings,
Speaker 1: and suddenly fifteen hundred Peruvian police officers and US Secret
Speaker 1: Service agents storm the doors. This was called Operation Sunset,
Speaker 1: and it was the finale of a long running inventstigation
Speaker 1: aimed at reducing the flow of counterfeit US dollars from Peru.
Speaker 1: They brought down six plants that had presses and plates
Speaker 1: and negatives and piles of fake one hundred dollar bills,
Speaker 1: and in just the past few years, counterfeit notes worth
Speaker 1: more than seventy five million dollars have been confiscated in Peru,
Speaker 1: and this is just one of lots of countries where
Speaker 1: you have fraudsters who are cooking up fake dollars, And
Speaker 1: it's essentially impossible to estimate the volume of counterfeit banknotes
Speaker 1: passing through the US economy. What you find is that
Speaker 1: the authorities claim they've captured most of the fakes, and
Speaker 1: the counterfeitters claim exactly the opposite. Anyhow, counterfeiting is a
Speaker 1: problem that faces every major player in the currency game.
Speaker 1: Russia seizes counterfeits in the range of two hundred million
Speaker 1: rubles per year. China captures five hundred million fake yu.
Speaker 1: A few years years ago, India terminated their five hundred
Speaker 1: and one thousand rupee notes, and this was at least
Speaker 1: partially because of the rising concern about forgeries and their
Speaker 1: inability to stem that. In Venezuela, the inflation was so
Speaker 1: bad that it became worthwhile for fraudsters to bleach the
Speaker 1: ten bole of oar bill and use the paper to
Speaker 1: forge notes in other currencies. So it turns out there
Speaker 1: are counterfeitters everywhere, and they're busy pushing fake banknotes into
Speaker 1: streets and squares in every major city. You may wonder
Speaker 1: how I came to care about counterfeits, given that I'm
Speaker 1: a neuroscientist. Well, what happened is some years ago I
Speaker 1: was giving a presentation at a brain science conference, and
Speaker 1: afterwards I was approached by this guy and we started talking,
Speaker 1: and I was surprised to learn that he was working
Speaker 1: for the European Central Bank. And I was surprised because
Speaker 1: it wasn't clear to me why someone like that would
Speaker 1: be at a highly academic neuroscience conference. As it turns out,
Speaker 1: his job was to find a solution to Europe's counterfeiting problem.
Speaker 1: Their problem was that the EU comes across hundreds of
Speaker 1: thousands of fake euro banknotes every year, mostly in the
Speaker 1: form of twenties and fifties. At the heart of the
Speaker 1: issue is the fact that governments spend millions creating security features.
Speaker 1: So while we're talking, take out a twenty dollars bill,
Speaker 1: or whatever country you're in, take out a high value bill.
Speaker 1: They all have similar security features. Now, if you look
Speaker 1: at it, you'll see that as you tilt the note
Speaker 1: slightly back in fourth there's color changing ink. So the
Speaker 1: color changes here of let's say the twenty and now
Speaker 1: if you hold this up to the light, what you'll
Speaker 1: see is a water mark that's otherwise invisible to you.
Speaker 1: You can't see it normally, and it's not printed on
Speaker 1: the front or the back, but it's printed on an
Speaker 1: intermediate layer and on euros, and actually on the one
Speaker 1: hundred dollars bill. What you see are holograms. So when
Speaker 1: you angle this and change this, it moves around slightly
Speaker 1: and appears to be three D. And you'll also see
Speaker 1: colored strips that display the value of the note. And
Speaker 1: if you happen to have an ultraviolet light, turn that
Speaker 1: on and hold the bill under it, and you'll see
Speaker 1: that the bill turns very colorful. You've got all these
Speaker 1: invisible fibers in it that fluoresce under ultraviolet. So a
Speaker 1: piece of currency is a bustling collection of security devices.
Speaker 1: The problem is that no one pays attention to these
Speaker 1: security devices. People who pass notes around in daily transactions
Speaker 1: don't typically pause to examine them carefully. The special ink,
Speaker 1: the watermark, the strip, the fibers, the hologram. These are
Speaker 1: very expensive security features and they are a totally wasted
Speaker 1: effort because counterfeit bills get passed from person to person
Speaker 1: and no one ever notices these or notices if they
Speaker 1: are badly rendered. Do you know how counterfeit bills almost
Speaker 1: always are found at the banks? And that's because real
Speaker 1: notes have one more feature, they have machine readable code
Speaker 1: in the bill. Counterfeitters can do a good job making
Speaker 1: a counterfeit, but they can't make the machine readable code,
Speaker 1: and that's why the bank catches those. But the counterfeiters
Speaker 1: don't need to do that because their bills get passed
Speaker 1: around and no one ever notices. And this problem of
Speaker 1: inattention led the European Central Bank to explore a simple question,
Speaker 1: could banknotes be better designed so that the person on
Speaker 1: the street would be more likely to notice when something
Speaker 1: was amiss? And for that they finally started to think
Speaker 1: about neuroscience. And that's how I got involved, because as
Speaker 1: our understanding of the brain has developed over recent decades,
Speaker 1: neuroscience has forged insights into a range of fields from
Speaker 1: early education to consumer behavior to government policy, and modern
Speaker 1: brain science has wide ranging applications, particularly when it comes
Speaker 1: to understanding the ways in which our perceptions of the
Speaker 1: world are inaccurate. In the case of banknotes, the questions
Speaker 1: were straightforward, what details do we notice or not notice?
Speaker 1: And why? What features could be better designed? To be
Speaker 1: brain compatible of all the anti counterfeiting measures that the
Speaker 1: government takes, which ones work, and how could their efforts
Speaker 1: be better spent. So the man at the conference eventually
Speaker 1: contracted with me to help them figure out the question
Speaker 1: how should Europe redesign their bills? So we signed a
Speaker 1: bunch of security documents and then I flew to the
Speaker 1: headquarters of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany. Now
Speaker 1: this was very cool because although the building was just
Speaker 1: a boring government building, I was beeped through a badge
Speaker 1: protected door, and then another, and then another, and we
Speaker 1: finally arrived at this small inner room at the heart
Speaker 1: of the building, and there were all these piles of
Speaker 1: money of euros, mostly twenties and fifties, and they were
Speaker 1: all counterfeit. Each pile had some feature that distinguished it,
Speaker 1: whether that was the way they had done the shiny
Speaker 1: foil or the way they had done the watermarks or whatever,
Speaker 1: and this is how the bank arranged them. Now, many
Speaker 1: of these forgeries were quite good. If you weren't paying
Speaker 1: super close attention, the kind of attention no one ever
Speaker 1: really pays to money, you couldn't tell there was anything
Speaker 1: amiss with most of these forgeries you could tell under
Speaker 1: ultraviolet light. But if you didn't have that, there was
Speaker 1: really nothing that would even make you think to pay
Speaker 1: extra attention. And here's a weird fact that I learned
Speaker 1: there in the vaults. These really good forgeries, they always
Speaker 1: have a slight error in them. And think about why
Speaker 1: this is weird. You've got a otherwise amazingly well done
Speaker 1: counterfeit bill, but it's got an error. For example, there
Speaker 1: are essentially perfect counterfeits of the American twenty dollars bill.
Speaker 1: But if you look at the number two, the way
Speaker 1: that the bottom of the two spreads out what's called
Speaker 1: the trumpeting in font language, it's just slightly wider than
Speaker 1: it is on a real bill. So what's going on
Speaker 1: with that? How can you get the whole bill right
Speaker 1: but not get that little detail right? And there's actually
Speaker 1: one more part to this mystery. There's only one mistake
Speaker 1: on a bill and no more than that. And the
Speaker 1: answer is it's not a mistake. It's on purpose, and
Speaker 1: it's because counterfeitters need a way to distinguish their own
Speaker 1: bills from the real ones. This is so they don't
Speaker 1: spend their real money accidentally. Okay, so some of these
Speaker 1: bills were almost perfect with this single tiny change, But
Speaker 1: that's not the part that's interesting. What's interesting is that
Speaker 1: most of the counterfeits were not as expertly done as
Speaker 1: you might expect. On almost all of them, the part
Speaker 1: where the color changing ink normally is didn't actually change color,
Speaker 1: and on others the water mark had been hand drawn
Speaker 1: really poorly, and in one pile of notes, the silver
Speaker 1: hologram had been impersonated with a glued piece of shiny
Speaker 1: material from the seal of a compact disc case. Many
Speaker 1: of the notes had essentially none of the actual security features.
Speaker 1: But the surprising thing is this, to get a counterfeit
Speaker 1: into circulation, most counterfeiters don't bother to go through the
Speaker 1: trouble of making an almost perfect one. Why because it
Speaker 1: makes almost no difference. Almost no one in the general
Speaker 1: public notices a bad forgery. People will stuff the notes
Speaker 1: into their wallets, and they'll pass them on, and the
Speaker 1: notes spread like a virus through the population. Because as
Speaker 1: banknote users, we are surprisingly unobservant. We just don't pay
Speaker 1: attention to the bills in our hand. The government spends
Speaker 1: an incredible amount on security features, and we don't even
Speaker 1: look at it now. The ECB tried to tackle this
Speaker 1: problem by hosting public awareness campaigns where they encourage people
Speaker 1: to stop and look carefully at what they were holding.
Speaker 1: The coach failed. People wouldn't put in the effort. Governments
Speaker 1: cary enormously about security features and the population doesn't. So
Speaker 1: the Central Bank now wanted to try a different tack.
Speaker 1: They wanted to work out what the human visual system
Speaker 1: actually notices and why there was no point spending a
Speaker 1: massive amount on security features that are only noticed by
Speaker 1: security experts. And that was the beginning of a long
Speaker 1: relationship I had with the ECB. For legal reasons, they
Speaker 1: couldn't manufacture or mail to me counterfeit bills, and so
Speaker 1: I had to figure out how to make pseudo bills myself. First,
Speaker 1: I had to get approval from my university for this
Speaker 1: very unusual study, and then my students that I set
Speaker 1: to work. As it turns out, it's not that difficult
Speaker 1: to make a rough counterfeit now. It happens that I
Speaker 1: was recently talking with my friend Adam Savage of MythBusters fame,
Speaker 1: and it turned out but that he also has done
Speaker 1: lots of forgeries of things not illegally, but legal versions
Speaker 1: of making replicas of all kinds of wonderful things. So
Speaker 1: before I tell you about my experiences, I wanted to
Speaker 1: ring up Adam to hear about his. So, Adam, you've
Speaker 1: done some countershitting. Tell me about that?
Speaker 3: Ha ha. Right, I don't want to brag that I've
Speaker 3: done some counterfeiting, but I'm obsessed with the idea of replication.
Speaker 3: That's one of my main practices here in the cave,
Speaker 3: and so like. Just for instance, recently, I obtained a
Speaker 3: really lovely replica of one of Leonardo da Vinci's coticies.
Speaker 3: This is known as the Paris manuscript A, and I've
Speaker 3: been slowly spending a couple of weeks making a completely
Speaker 3: accurate cover for it, based on the information from the
Speaker 3: collection that it's since so I've been printing up the
Speaker 3: cover full size of and having the collection stamps made,
Speaker 3: and I'm gonna slowly make this thing indistinguishable from the original.
Speaker 3: So that's the kind of counterfeiting I really dig is
Speaker 3: the experiential counterfeit.
Speaker 1: Oh that's amazing. Now let me ask you this. Do
Speaker 1: you find that if there are changes things you don't
Speaker 1: get perfect? Do you find that people don't notice those.
Speaker 3: People's threshold for what they notice is it's an interesting
Speaker 3: mixture because you can kind of bypass some of their
Speaker 3: filters with the right amount of aging, or even sometimes
Speaker 3: a smell will just have someone bypass all their filters
Speaker 3: from what they can see. So it's really different object
Speaker 3: by object about what the threshold is for what lends
Speaker 3: what feels like an experience of veracity.
Speaker 1: Have you ever tried counterfeiting money? Is that something you've
Speaker 1: ever tried?
Speaker 3: Uh? I have made so behind me here on my
Speaker 3: desk pieces in my collection, and it's the bank box
Speaker 3: from the Borne identity, and this is the act bank
Speaker 3: box from the Bourne identity. I bought it empty, but
Speaker 3: one of my long term plans is to actually fill
Speaker 3: it full of original bills or correct bills. And this
Speaker 3: is made easier by the fact that a lot of
Speaker 3: the bills that were in the Boorne identity bank box
Speaker 3: are now euros, and so those original currencies, the real
Speaker 3: it's the frank et cetera, are no longer extant, and
Speaker 3: so I get suitably and appropriately nervous even doing Google
Speaker 3: searches about replicating money. But to me, your job of
Speaker 3: actually trying some counterfeits to see what work sounds like
Speaker 3: an absolute dream come true for me. I was like
Speaker 3: I was born to be a pen tester.
Speaker 1: Okay, so back to my counterfeiting contract. So the notes
Speaker 1: that we made in the lab had no security features
Speaker 1: like holograms or color changing ink, because that wasn't precisely
Speaker 1: what we were studying. We were studying how much somebody
Speaker 1: would notice if we presented them with a bill with
Speaker 1: a particular design, and we let them examine it and
Speaker 1: turn it around in their hands, and then we took
Speaker 1: it back and we handed them another note, and that
Speaker 1: other note might have some change that was made to it,
Speaker 1: and we asked them, is this the same bill or
Speaker 1: a different one? In other words, how much do they
Speaker 1: remember about the note that they just examined. Now, you
Speaker 1: might expect that if you get to examine a note carefully,
Speaker 1: it's not going to be any problem to see when
Speaker 1: something changes, But you'd be shocked at the limits of
Speaker 1: our observation and our memory. Take a simple experiment run
Speaker 1: by the psychologists Raymond Nickerson and Marilyn Adams in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine. What they did is they showed people fifteen
Speaker 1: different drawings of the US penny, and one was the
Speaker 1: actual penny, while the other drawings were manipulated versions where
Speaker 1: you had the date in a different place, or you
Speaker 1: had the slogan changed, for example, United States of America
Speaker 1: instead of in God we Trust. And fewer than half
Speaker 1: the participants could identify which one was the correct penny.
Speaker 1: Although the participants handled pennies almost every day of their lives,
Speaker 1: they hadn't paid attention in the way they thought they had.
Speaker 1: Experience doesn't translate into expertise. Why not. It's because we
Speaker 1: only see what we closely attend to. So imagine you
Speaker 1: catch a glimpse of a man and a woman having
Speaker 1: a picnic in a park. All you actually see is
Speaker 1: something like man, woman food. With time, as you crawl
Speaker 1: the scene with your attentional systems, you'll incorporate more details.
Speaker 1: Oh they've got bulls of suit. It's a checkered blanket
Speaker 1: that's a little unusual. There are hills in the background,
Speaker 1: and with more time you'll notice, Oh, his spoon is
Speaker 1: slightly bent, or she's wearing a silver necklace, or the
Speaker 1: encircling trees are buckthorn. But we incorporate more detail into
Speaker 1: a scene only if we pay more attention and we
Speaker 1: ask more questions. And as I said before, it's like
Speaker 1: this with all of our senses. What is the feeling
Speaker 1: of your pants on your left kneecap right now, or
Speaker 1: the feeling of your shirt on your shoulders. As soon
Speaker 1: as you ask these questions, you can become aware of
Speaker 1: the answer, but you didn't know until you queried. So
Speaker 1: our visual sense is not like a camera that's taking
Speaker 1: in the complete scene. Instead, we see only the details
Speaker 1: that we go out to seek. And this is the
Speaker 1: issue with the banknotes. We may glance at one to
Speaker 1: verify that it matches the general template expecting, but we
Speaker 1: don't scrutinize the details. And that's why the European central
Speaker 1: banks campaign to stop and pay attention to money it
Speaker 1: just didn't work. We don't attend to things that sufficiently
Speaker 1: fit our assumptions. We believe we already know the note
Speaker 1: in our hands.
Speaker 3: I recently had a fake bail passed to me in
Speaker 3: New York City. I was getting a hot dog, which
Speaker 3: was four bucks, and I gave him a ten, and
Speaker 3: he gave me what looked like a one and a five,
Speaker 3: except the five was I'm on the street, right, I'm
Speaker 3: just I put it in my pocket. I get back
Speaker 3: to my room. The five was actually a discontinued old
Speaker 3: five thousand yen Japanese note.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 3: We had Matt respect for him for handing that directly
Speaker 3: to me.
Speaker 1: That's amazing because you're a guy who pays so much
Speaker 1: attention to what's there, and even for you, you expect
Speaker 1: you're getting a five back, and so your brain fills
Speaker 1: in all the blanks and you just take it and
Speaker 1: you go, well, I mean, you know.
Speaker 3: It's a difficult problem to solve when you realize that
Speaker 3: we regularly interact with bills that are ancient and are
Speaker 3: filthy and like soft leather and brand new, and they're
Speaker 3: crisp and smell totally differently and look totally different. When
Speaker 3: you hold those two up against each other and you think,
Speaker 3: I've got to get someone to be able to parse
Speaker 3: that both of these are real, that's that's a complicated
Speaker 3: problem to solve.
Speaker 1: What the EU Opinion Union does is they have all
Speaker 1: these security features in their bills. They spend so much
Speaker 1: money for these security features, and no one ever notices.
Speaker 1: So my job is to figure out which elements of
Speaker 1: the banknotes were noticed and which weren't, and to make
Speaker 1: recommendations for next step. We performed a series of experiments
Speaker 1: for over a year and in the end it became
Speaker 1: obvious to me what needed to be done. So in
Speaker 1: my final presentation to the European Central Bank, I put
Speaker 1: forward evidence that the watermark on the euro should be
Speaker 1: a face instead of a building. Why it's because the
Speaker 1: human brain is massively specialized to recognizing faces, but it
Speaker 1: has little neural real estate devoted to buildings. You can
Speaker 1: see a building and then you can see a building
Speaker 1: that looks sort of like it, and you really can't
Speaker 1: tell the difference. Maybe you can't if you're an architect,
Speaker 1: but the rest of us just wouldn't notice. And forged
Speaker 1: water marks are generally hand drawn, and that's because it's
Speaker 1: this intermediate layer and you need to do that by hand.
Speaker 1: And it turns out that if you draw a building,
Speaker 1: even if you do a really lousy job, no one's
Speaker 1: going to catch the difference. Your brain just doesn't care
Speaker 1: that much about the exact details of a building. But
Speaker 1: contrast this with faces. We have a ton of brain
Speaker 1: territory devoted to faces. Think about the difference in the
Speaker 1: faces of the people you see every day. The length
Speaker 1: of the nose, the distance between the eyes, the shape
Speaker 1: of the lips. These are really subtle details, but we're
Speaker 1: super sensitive to picking up on these. Now, this is
Speaker 1: of course for human faces. You presumably couldn't tell that
Speaker 1: much difference between the faces of twenty different German shepherd dogs.
Speaker 1: They all sort of look alike to you. But now
Speaker 1: put yourself in the position of the dog. Presumably humans
Speaker 1: look mostly alike to it. But the details we are
Speaker 1: so sensitive to, like the hairline and the cheekbones, and
Speaker 1: the length of the nose and the exact position of
Speaker 1: the ears and all that stuff, would mean nothing to
Speaker 1: the dog. But we are incredibly sensitive to these tiny,
Speaker 1: tiny differences. And this is why it's so much easier
Speaker 1: to spot an imperfect face than an imperfect building. And
Speaker 1: this is why the ECB decided to change the watermark
Speaker 1: on fifty year D bill from a building to a face. Now, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: they had an implementation challenge, a political one, which is,
Speaker 1: how can they get all the different countries to agree
Speaker 1: on one person's face. What nationality were they going to choose?
Speaker 1: The Italians were going to want Michelangelo, the British would
Speaker 1: want Shakespeare, the French would want Napoleon, and so on.
Speaker 1: That's why they had originally chosen a building, because that
Speaker 1: circumvented the argument. But now there was a reason to
Speaker 1: choose a face. So finally someone suggested that instead of
Speaker 1: fighting it out between historical heroes, they should just settle
Speaker 1: on the mythological Princess Europa, after whom Europe is named,
Speaker 1: and so the new fifty dollars note with her face
Speaker 1: rolled out in twenty seventeen. Now that move is a
Speaker 1: step in the right direction, but since they chose a
Speaker 1: mythological face with no single correct version, it's slightly less
Speaker 1: useful than a face everyone would recognize, like if they'd
Speaker 1: used Juliete Bnotia's face or Benedict Cumberbatch's face. But anyway,
Speaker 1: it was a good start. But that was only my
Speaker 1: first recommendation. I then recommended that all euro banknotes should
Speaker 1: be the same size, the way that American bills are.
Speaker 1: Why because that would at least get people to look
Speaker 1: at them a bit longer to see what they're dealing with.
Speaker 1: Right if you're handing someone an American bill, they have
Speaker 1: to stare at it for some hundreds of milliseconds longer
Speaker 1: just to register what in the heck they're holding, because
Speaker 1: there aren't other clues from size, whereas in Europe you
Speaker 1: grab a bill and you know much faster if it's
Speaker 1: a twenty or fifty or whatever, and as a result,
Speaker 1: you pay even less attention to what is written on it. Now,
Speaker 1: there are advantages to the blind community in having bills
Speaker 1: of different sizes, but now you can do three D
Speaker 1: printing on bills, and so the blind community no longer
Speaker 1: needs different sizes to be able to tell what bill
Speaker 1: they're holding. Now, the council told me that while they
Speaker 1: took my point, there was no way they were going
Speaker 1: to make all the bills the same size. Why it
Speaker 1: wasn't just because they'd have to retool the mints where
Speaker 1: they print the bills, but more importantly, they'd have to
Speaker 1: retool all the vending machines in Europe, and this was
Speaker 1: an impossible amount of work, which got me thinking about
Speaker 1: the way that things get ensconced. They get calcified into
Speaker 1: place by some historical trajectory, and then it becomes too
Speaker 1: hard to change it, like the way that we use
Speaker 1: the imperial measuring system in America, where it's not based
Speaker 1: on tens, and therefore it's very difficult to convert between
Speaker 1: different units, like we have twelve inches equally a foot
Speaker 1: or sixteen ounces is a pound. And when I was
Speaker 1: a kid, there was a big push to teach both
Speaker 1: the imperial and the metric systems at the same time
Speaker 1: so that we could slowly make the transition into something
Speaker 1: that made more sense. But it just proved too hard
Speaker 1: to change because the imperial measurement system got calcified into place,
Speaker 1: and then you can't get rid of it. So anyway,
Speaker 1: the European Central Bank acknowledge that I had a point
Speaker 1: about the bill size, but they concluded it would just
Speaker 1: be too much work to retool everything. So they asked
Speaker 1: for my next recommendation, and here was my chance to
Speaker 1: deliver my clincher. This was a sense that had been
Speaker 1: creeping up on me for the entire year that I'd
Speaker 1: been studying the problem of counterfeiting. The heart of the
Speaker 1: problem is that notes are jam packed with decorative features
Speaker 1: that have nothing to do with the security. So you
Speaker 1: have pictures of trees and patriots and birds and flags,
Speaker 1: you have swirling colors, and no one notices the security
Speaker 1: features because of all these distractions. So I told them
Speaker 1: that a piece of current, see a bill, should be
Speaker 1: a blank, white piece of paper with a single hologram
Speaker 1: in the middle. That's it, nothing else on it. A
Speaker 1: counterfeiter wouldn't be able to replicate that without serious specialized equipment,
Speaker 1: and the person in the street wouldn't be distracted by
Speaker 1: all the detailing that has nothing to do with the security.
Speaker 1: So they agreed with my recommendation in theory, but they
Speaker 1: rejected it on the grounds that there's too much cultural
Speaker 1: momentum in the design of banknotes. In other words, people
Speaker 1: expect notes to look a certain way. Currencies are supposed
Speaker 1: to impress the viewer with the regal power and artistic
Speaker 1: talents of the ruling body, and apparently no government wants
Speaker 1: to appear unregal and unartistic when compared to another government.
Speaker 1: And so the experiment came to a close. The building
Speaker 1: got changed to a face, which was a good start,
Speaker 1: but so much about the rest of currencies is stuck
Speaker 1: in place. So we'll see what happens with the future
Speaker 1: of digital exchanges like PayPal or Venmo and the future
Speaker 1: of crypto, but it appears that for now paper money
Speaker 1: is sticking around almost everywhere on the planet. So it's
Speaker 1: still my general hope that some government somewhere will get
Speaker 1: this straight. And the advantage for them is they'll have
Speaker 1: massively less counterfeiting to drag on their economy. So if
Speaker 1: you're going to start a new country, take this podcast
Speaker 1: as my free advice for how to do your bills.
Speaker 1: Effective solutions from science can sometimes bump up against tradition,
Speaker 1: but if we really care about tackling a problem, we
Speaker 1: have to move beyond adherence to custom. The human visual
Speaker 1: system is never going to notice security features that are
Speaker 1: buried in other details, and if you give your brain
Speaker 1: any excuse to believe it knows what's out there, it
Speaker 1: will take shortcuts and make extra assumptions. So this episode
Speaker 1: repeats a theme that you're going to hear many times
Speaker 1: on this show. Whenever you want to improve society, you
Speaker 1: have to do your best to understand the details of
Speaker 1: the brains that comprise that society. That's all for this week.
Speaker 1: To find out more and to share your thoughts, head
Speaker 1: over to Eagleman dot com slash Podcasts, and you can
Speaker 1: also watch full episodes of Inner Cosmos on YouTube. Subscribe
Speaker 1: to my channel so you can follow along each week
Speaker 1: for new updates until next time. I'm David Eagleman and
Speaker 1: this is Inner Cosmos.